| Safety production accidents at workplace not only cause serious economic losses to enterprises,but also seriously endanger the occupational safety and health and even the lives of employees.Although great progress has been made in the theoretical research of safety behavior science and the practice of safety management in China since 1949,production safety is still a serious challenge to enterprises.A large number of studies at home and abroad have confirmed that employee safety violations are one of the root causes of safety production accidents.Therefore,analyzing the formation mechanism of employees’ safety violations to effectively prevent workplace safety violations has become the focus of the enterprise,the government and the society.A large number of literatures have analyzed the antecedents of safety violations from the perspective of individual and situational context,which have made important contributions to understanding why employees violate safety policies and procedures.However,there are still the some questions to be answered.First,previous studies have examined the impacts of different factors related to employees,work and organization on workplace safety or unsafe behaviors,but paid little attention to the mechanism through which social contagion of safety violations within teams or organizations happens.Second,most studies focus on positive leadership such as transformational leadership and transactional leadership,but ignore the impact of negative leadership such as leader rewards and punishments omission on safety violations.Third,the lack of theoretical integration and focus on the net effects of single factors in the existing workplace safety literature have led to mixed findings and limited theoretical development on safety violations.In the present research,five studies were conducted to narrow these gaps in workplace safety literature.The first study examined whether coworkers’ safety violations affect focal employees’ safety violations.Combined social learning theory with social information processing theory,a total of 1294 responses were analyzed to test the causal relationship between coworkers’ and focal employees’ safety violations with the propensity score matching method.Empirical results found that the interpersonal contagion effect of safety violations is universal,and this contagion effect is not moderated by contextual factors such as industry risk,enterprise scale,enterprise property right,and employees’ employment form and gender.Further,compared with large enterprises,employees in small and medium-sized enterprises(SME)are more affected by coworkers’ safety violations.Female(informal)employees are more likely to be affected by coworkers’ safety violations than male(formal)ones.The second study examined how coworkers’ safety violations affect focal employee’s safety violations.By integrating social learning theory and general deterrence theory,this built on a mediation model for understanding the mechanism through which interpersonal contagion of safety violations happens.Empirical evidence based on data from 353 front-line employees in high-risk industries demonstrated the positive relationship between coworkers’ and focal employees’ safety violations,thus further confirming the findings of Study 1.Moreover,results suggested that both perceived punishment certainty and severity and perceived shame certainty and severity mediated the effect of coworkers’ safety violations on focal employees’ safety violations.The third study paid closer attention to the effect of safety-specific leader reward and punishment omission on employees’ safety violations.Before testing this effect,we developed and validated the Safety-specific Leader Reward and Punishment Omission Questionnaire with data from 557 front-line employees in high-risk industries.Then,empirical evidence based on data from 683 front-line employees in high-risk industries demonstrated the positive relationship between safety-specific leader reward omission and safety-specific leader punishment omission and employees’ safety violations,respectively.Furthermore,enterprise scale buffers the relationship between safety-specific leader punishment omission and employees’ safety violations.Employee safety moral belief can reduce the relationship between safety-specific leader reward omission and safety-specific leader punishment omission and employees’ safety violations,respectively.The fourth study analyzed the underlying mechanism through which safety-specific leader reward and punishment omission correlated with employees’ safety violations.Based on the laissez faire leadership,organizational justice theory and job demand-resource model,this study examined the mediations of safety-specific distributive justice and safety-specific role ambiguity on the relationship between safety-specific leader reward and punishment omission and employees’ safety violations.Through the empirical evidence from 307 front-line employees in high-risk industries,safety-specific leader reward omission was found to be positively associated with employees’ safety violations through the mediations of safety-specific distributive justice and safety-specific role ambiguity.Safety-specific leader punishment omission was also positively associated with employees’ safety violations through the mediation of safety-specific role ambiguity,while safety-specific distributive justice was an insignificant mediator.The last study explored how the combination among coworkers’ safety violations,safetyspecific leader reward and punishment omission and employees’ cognitive factors influences employees’ safety violations.By integrating contemporary deterrence theory,protection motivation theory and social learning theory,we built on a comprehensive analysis framework and embraced a complexity theoretical perspective to explore how causal antecedent conditions of three domains combine into configurational causes of employee safety violations.Specifically,an emerging fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis(fs QCA)was adopted to analyze the datasets of 354 employees from SMEs in Chinese high-risk industries,and thus to reveal the complex configurations of six antecedent conditions.The findings not only identify five configurations that contribute to employees’ high safety violations and three configurations contributing to employees’ non-high safety violations,but also confirm the complex causality between six antecedents and employees’ high/non-high safety violations,namely conjunction,equifinality and asymmetry.This study makes theoretical contributions in the following aspects.First,this paper is one of the first studies that put forward and confirm the contagion effect of safety violations between coworkers and employees,and reveals two parallel mechanisms through which such contagion effect happens from the perspective of rational cognition and emotional experience,by integrating social learning theory and general deterrence theory.Second,in the context of occupational safety,it first develops the Safety-specific Leader Reward and Punishment Omission Scale,thus providing a measuring tool for examining the impact of passive avoidance leadership on safety compliance or violations in the future.Third,it takes the lead in this field to propose and confirm the reinforcement effect of safety-specific leader reward omission and punishment omission(two specific passive avoidance leadership behaviors)on employee safety violations,and further reveals the dual mechanisms of this effect.Lastly,by integrating three main theoretical perspectives to develop a comprehensive analysis framework of safety violations,the fs QCA,for the first time in this field,is used to explore the configuration effect of six antecedent conditions,i.e.,coworkers’ safety violations,safety-specific leader reward and punishment omission and employees’ cognition factors,on employee safety violations,which offers more detailed understanding of the complex causality between employee safety violations and its multiple antecedents. |
